Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

May threatens ban on 'hate-inciting' radicals, even if they don't promote violence

Re: Police state

Although to be fair - she didn't say this would be a bad thing.

I risk become irresistible to women by going to the gym, growing 6 inches and getting my hair back - but i'm managing to resist the impulse.

Re: Daily Mail crowd is on the warpath again...

I don't think reading the Daily Mail should be a crime as such - more a symptom of a notifiable disease.

Re: May on the Andrew Marr Show

Seems rather unfair to call the IRA 's efforts 'improvised'

As Official Suppliers of Terrorism to the Monarchy for almost 100 years they surely deserve some sort of official recognition - perhaps a royal warrant?

Bill Gates: Corporate tax is not a moral issue

Re: We're in trouble...

>Just take some time to look at what his foundation is achieving, then jump off your high horse.

Money which was 'earned' by running a monopoly that invented a lot of these tax scams.

Re: Corporate tax is not a moral issue

So by the same token, if it was cheaper to pay the fines they should remove any safety procedures?

Redundancy payments were very expensive so we sent all the managers on a training course to the arctic on a Liberian freighter - the freighter met the minimum Liberian safety requirements and it's not our fault that it sank.

Re: But they are required

>If the makers of Star Wars made the film here but then claimed everyone was actually doing the work in Ireland then that's obviously a lie and that's the sort of trick Google and others are pulling.

That's almost what they did - Star Wars still hasn't made a profit, so some of the English actors involved still haven't received any royalties

'Chinese hack' scoops plan to Oz spook HQ

Re: Credibility factor missing - as usual

or that's what they want you to think !

But they won't need to - now that they have the plans they can abseil down from the roof avoiding the (strangely visible) laser defence network

But since all the australian spy agency does is spy on other branches of the australian government while failing to notice the large number of foreign spies generally working for it (ie they are exactly like every other intelligence agency) - this isn't going to do much harm

Tennis pro serves up pic of bad French Open line call

Re: He lost the match

>In most sports there is also a rule that the umpire or referee's decision is final even when wrong.

Presumably there is no need to even start cricket matches anymore - just ask the umpire which bookies paid most

Lenovo planning US smartphone push as PC sales stall

Re: Whodda thunk?

And yet sales of $600 iPhones and iPads have gone through the roof.

I think it's more accurate to say, sales of horse buggies have declined in the 21st century

Unknown brand

Outside the rarified world of discerning el'reg readers and a few spotty teens who read FHM for the product reviews there are two types of phone, iPhone and "other".

If you can't afford an iPhone or your local provider offers a great deal on brand X you will buy brand X, nobody cares if it is an HTC running Android or an XYZ running Android.

Iran fingered for attacks on US power firms

Re: Wank

Do you really expect us to believe that politicians would exaggerated the threat from a foreign country for their own political gains and to justify a war?

Surely we stopped doing that 45mins ago

BBC suspends CTO after £100m is wasted on doomed IT system

Re: Bad management

Because you generally do research on ideas you want to implement before you write a cheque for the servers.

BBC techie poeple had been into the idea of making everything remote and digital for years, this is just the latest actual implementation to cost a lot of money

Re: Bad management

Our CS department got a research grant to work on this in the early 2000s

It was insane - the idea was that a BBC person in any BBC office in the country could use any machine to edit any bit of content from anywhere in the BBC.

Asked why anybody would need to do this - why would somebody in BBC Belfast suddenly need to edit the raw camera footage for a BBC wildlife unit documentary in Bristol?

The answer as that staff could move around to make better use of resources. So if you are in London and all the edit suites are booked, you can fly to Belfast and use an editing machine there and the wonderful iCloudy goodness would give you full access to the data store

The assumption was that internet bandwidth would increase at the same rate it had done in the 90s and that there was no issues of access or control because everybody in the BBC as one big happy family - and presumably there was no outside content, no content being sold to other broadcasters and no rivalry between programmes.

Director of future media?

Simple way to cut costs - go through an organisation and fire anybody called "a creative consultant visionary" or a "director of social media inclusiveness"

Not only will you save their inflated salaries, you will improve morale and reduce the overall level of stupidity

AT&T adds 61¢ 'Mobility Administrative Fee' for users

Fido Canada

Adveritise a $30/month plan

Then 99c 911 fee (probably fair enough)

Then $7.95/month for caller id - well it's expensive to write to each caller asking them their phone number

Then $7.95/month for voice mail - plus the minute used to retrieve it

Then a $7.95/month "system access fee" - for access to the system presumably

But at least it's better than the rival's $50/month plan

World's richest hobo (Apple) has worked 'tax-free' in Ireland since '80s

Re: 100% legal, yet so easy to fix...

The law in Ireland isn't accidentally out of date - it's deliberately designed so that companies making sales in the UK, Germany, France etc using the public services of all those countries don't pay any tax to them but Ireland does manage to take a small percentage.

It's basically a parasite on the rest of Europe and the way to deal with it is to make sure that no eu money for nice expensive roads in the middle of nowhere goes to them - or just throw them out.

Suppose Middlesbrough council declared that anybody who visited the place and bought a T-shirt would be able to claim a special Middlesbrough investor status and not pay any income tax in the rest of the UK. It would bring more money into the 'brough and be perfectly legal - but London might object.

Because none of their sales were in the UK.

The 2300 people in the London office talking to customers asking them to buy advertising were all just "advisers" - the sales were all made by one very very busy employee in Ireland.

Re: "tax resident nowhere in the world"

It doesn't work for US citizens - you pay tax on your worldwide income.

You then get to deduct the tax you already paid abroad, which is often more than the US tax would be, so you don't actually pay any more to the US.

but although US corporations are citizens this somehow doesn't apply to them

Re: US Corporation tax

Because nobody pays it - well nobody that matters

Instead of reducing it down to a reasonable level it stays high but farmers lobby for a tax exemption for farming - because it's vital to the national interest. Boeing lobbies for a tax exemption for aircraft builders because they are vital to the national interest, Ford because they are vital to Detroit etc

Modern high tech companies prefer to pay tax lawyers than lobbyists and just hide the money offshore

So lots of politicians get vital campaign contributions from lobbyists, they can tell their voters that they fought for the exemptions for whichever industry is in their state and the only people that suffer is small business that can't afford lobbyists - but who cares about them ?

Research is needed

It used to be thought that a warm sunny beach and relaxed CFOs was the reason that companies in the Cayman islands and Dutch Antilles were so profitable.

Or perhaps the mountain air and triangular chocolate led Switzerland and Lichtenstein to be world leaders in corporate affairs.

Now we also have to factor in rain and Guinness.

Presumably if somewhere could be found that had mountains, hot sunny beaches and taste-free whiskey (with an e) it would lead to such managerial brilliance that all worlds problems could be solved

Internet cafés declared 'illegal businesses' in Ohio

Ban everything

Senator Hughes said some Ohio gas stations had been linked to money laundering, fraud, drug sales, and even human trafficking.

Paul Allen buys lovingly restored vintage V-2 Nazi ballistic missile

Re: I can recommend La Coupole

I always thought that would be a good tactic (for the opposition)

Pretend to build some super secret weapon in a mountain, leak lots of details about how dangerous it is and watch as the good guys spend all their time and effort of their premium bomber crews trying to destroy it.

For a bonus surround it with lots of anti-aircraft defences so bombing it is almost suicide.

Re: A question for rocket scientists on El Reg...

Obviously the quality of the beer

Hey, you, dev. What do you mean, storage is BORING?

I want storage to be boring

Like I want internet connectivity to be boring.

The last thing I want is for anything my works relies on to be at the white heat of the cutting edge of technological metaphor

Feds slam hacker-friendly backdoors in jalopy, grub factories

Even worse - every country in the world then demands the same facility.

So you have to either design 178 different secure backdoors and ensure that you sell the correct model to each country. Or you create a single law enforcement backdoor and give the same access to everyone.

So the radios you are supplying to the police in the USA have a backdoor and you tell the security services of the "enemy country of the day" the code, because they bought the same radio

Re: @Andrew Jones 2

Money

Customers demanded remote access so they didn't to send a truck and a service person out to drive miles to change a setting on a traffic light, storm sewer or air quality monitor

Then they demanded that they use regular wifi/gsm etc so that they could dump the fixed phone line.

At no point did they say they would pay extra for milpec security and so the suppliers didn't fit it

You might as well ask why your home isn't fireproof or your car isn't theft proof - because the costs outweigh the risks

'Google IS a capitalist country... er, company'

In a historical context

Slavery cannot be about morality – there are no absolutes. It is about responsible judgment, finding the balance between shareholder fiduciary duty, stakeholder responsibility, controlling labour costs and and delivering cotton at a price the market find acceptable

Daft tweet by Speaker Bercow's loquacious wife DID libel lord

Re: The part I dont understand

Because ITV could legitimately claim that nobody watches the program, those that do watch it don't understand it, and even if they did nobody cares what they think.

Re: The Law is an Ass

In other words the day after a Ripper murder, to print a headline asking "why is the prince of wales buying so many razors?" isn't that different from printing "the prince of wales is Jack the Ripper" - smiley face or not.

4G LTE: Good for tweets and watching Dr Who. Crap at saving lives

Re: Imagine

But at least digital isn't as susceptible to interference.

A 500khz AM pirate radio ship off East Anglia can apparently knock out every vital communication system from lifeboats in Cornwall to the RAF in Scotland - or at least that's what's claimed when they are shutting them down,

'Leccy car biz baron Elon Musk: Thanks for the $500m, taxpayers...

Re: @Chaz

Only by the standards of some very "Hollywood accounting".

Some car companies paid back their TARP "loan" only by not including the majority of the TARP that was paid to cover debts and losses by divisions and pension funds that were turned into separate companies and spun off to the government.

According to the TARP inspector general "The most recent cost estimate for TARP is a loss of $60 billion. Taxpayers are still owed $118.5 billion (including $14 billion written off or otherwise lost)."

It's a bit like the UK government claiming to make a profit on Northern Rock if you don't count the billions in bad debt that weren't part of the sell off.

Re: Wow

If only people stopped wasting money on all this technological research we could get on with the job of harvesting nuts and berries and hunting bison

Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi

Re: The Military governor of Guantanamo is pre-empting...

If only they had thought of using that excuse rather than the "only following orders" the last lot would have got off

Re: The Military governor of Guantanamo is pre-empting...

Building "holiday" camps in another country so that your laws don't apply and they are then completely legal?

That didn't work out so well last time

We need Gitmo to counter the growing threat of home grown American terrorists http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/

Smartwatch face off: Pebble, MetaWatch and new hi-tech timepieces

Does it have a calculator?

That's what I really want in a watch

Save me carrying an HP48G around everyday

Opera rewrite comes to Android

Re: Erm

OK got my update this morning.

I've never seen the "app is not responding, wait, cancel etc" box before on Android.

Managed to reinstall opera mini - but can't find opera mobile anymore

Opera mini doesn't handle the accept conditions redirect page on the free wifi here.

Erm

And this is different from the Opera Mobile and Opera Mini I've been using since Android 2.1 ?

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

Re: yes

Except presumably before launching their nuclear war on the west the Soviet high command might have decided to move to a little place in the country. So targetting everything on Moscow is a little bit "operation stable door"

Ed Miliband brands Google's UK tax avoidance 'WRONG'

What a brave and principled politician

Now go to one of your safe seats in Derby and tell the workers that Rolls Royce is evil for not only paying no UK tax but claiming a multi-million tax refund for "training"

'India attacked Norwegian telco to get at Pakistan, China' - report

Re: Inevitable

Or it could be a double bluff by the Norwegians.

Just look at the statistics.

1st millenium, no internet, lots of viking attacks

2nd millenium, limited internet, reduced viking attacks

3rd millenium, universal internet, no viking attacks

The vikings have obviously moved into cyberwarfare.

Thinktank: 'Lab-smashing' Stuxnet helped Iran's nuke effort

Re: The lesson is stealth

The problem with keeping it secret, is that the US will inevitably make a movie claiming it was all their work

Re: Hmmmmm.....

Time to invade Holland ?

Re: Closed the door

I'm pretty sure the click-through Eula prohibits it's use by any other inteligence agencies

Re: Exactly...

That's generally considered sufficient evidence to start a war - at least in that part of the world

Irish deputy PM: You want more tax from Apple? Your problem, not ours

Re: What precisely was this guy responding to?

It helps if the other country is in the Eu so there is no import duty.

So Mr Romanian president, lower the rate to 10% and we will pretend to invest billions of $ and create 1000s of jobs in your country. Or at least put up a few brass plaques outside lawyers offices

Re: What precisely was this guy responding to?

Right upto the point where some other European country decides to make it 10% or 5%

It used to be that Ireland did very well with US corporations: between the language, golf courses, whiskey and the "Mr Obama - come and meet your ancestors, the O'bamas" angle.

But with $$$bn at stake I'm sure a few CFOs can face having their euro-headquarters in Luxembourg or Romania.

Re: I got an interesting idea

To be fair that wasn't just tax - Bono's ego was getting too large for Ireland, people were being pushed into the sea off Galway.